Saturday, August 30, 2014

Vesa Oittinen, Evald Ilyenkov's Philosophy Revisited

On behalf of the Department
of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, it is a great honour for me to open the
Symposium on Evald Ilyenkov. The Symposium is a joint project of the Department
of Philosophy (Faculty of Arts), the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental
Work Research (Faculty of Education), and the Alexander Institute. It is thus
a multidisciplinary enterprise in a positive sense. The main effort in planning
and organizing the Symposiurn has been made by Dr. Vesa Oittinen to whom we
are all most grateful.

Evald
Ilyenkov was born in Smolensk in 1924. He started his studies at the Institute
of History, Philosophy and Literature in the University of Moscow. After the
World War he continued his studies and defended in 1953 his candidate thesis
on the questions of dialectical logic in Marx's economic works. From 1953 to
his untimely death in 1979 he worked at the Institute of Philosophy in the Academy
of Science of the Soviet Union.

Ilyenkov's study of the dialectics
of abstract and concrete in Marx's Capital appeared in 1960. Combining
his interest in the history of philosophy with contemporary debates, he published
in 1968 his doctoral dissertation on “the question of the nature of thought”.

Ilyenkov's book on Dialectical
Logic appeared in Russian in 1974, and as an English translation in 1977. In
this work, he tried to combine the Marxist‑Leninist theory of knowledge
with methodological questions about special scientific disciplines. In his posthumous
work, he discussed Lenin's conception of materialist dialectics.

Ilyenkov's works had a profound
impact on Soviet philosophy and his studies influenced also a generation of
Western Marxism. Today Ilyenkov would be 75 years old. His voluntary death already
for twenty years ago prevented him from seeing the decline of Soviet Union,
followed in the Western Marxism by the flight back to historical studies in
Hegel and eventually to disappointed postmodernism. I will not make any guess
at the judgment that Ilyenkov might have given about the present state of the
world. But during this conference we shall hearseveral assessments of
the significance of his work and its continuing relevance. I am very impressed
by the programme which includes papers both by Ilyenkov's close friends, his
followers in the study of human actions, and his admirers in contemporary theories
of language, semiotics, and aesthetics.

Coming myself from the Anglo‑Saxon
tradition of analytic philosophy, I should like to make a personal remark. In
the late 1970s I read an English translation of Ilyenkov's article The Concept
of the Ideal, which I found strikingly similar to Karl Popper's conception
of the World 3 of human social constructions. In 1981 I read a Finnish translation
of Ilyenkov's essay on the genesis of human personality through concrete action
and interaction with the material and social environments. Both articles defend
very interesting views which are materialistic in an enlightened way but at
the same time critical of vulgar interpretations of materialism. Ilyenkov's
views on the development of human personality continued the great tradition
of cognitive psychology in the Soviet Union. One can understand that his independent
views gave emphasis and a voice to ideas that were not very fashionable in the
Soviet philosophy in the 1970s but make him a most interesting object of study
among contemporary philosophers and psychologists.

More generally, when the new
Millennium is starting, it will be worthwhile and rewarding to assess and re‑evaluate
the achievements of philosophers and psychologists who worked in the tradition
of Marxist dialectics both in the Soviet Union and other countries. It is no
doubt that their publications contain parts that strike us as dogmatic errors.
But just like in the study of medieval philosophy, we are now able to distinguish
the genuine philosophical ideas from the particular theologically or politically
correct form in which they were dressed in the historical context. The symposium
on Evald Ilyenkov is an example of such efforts of reconsidering the history
of contemporary philosophy.